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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Kanye West Always Wanted You to Watch

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      The three-part Netflix documentary “Jeen-yuhs” shows the superstar in his earliest days, then time warps to the present, with disorienting results.No one could quite understand why the young producer was being followed by a cameraman. Almost everywhere Kanye West went beginning in the early 2000s — before “Through the Wire,” before “The College Dropout,” before anything, really — he was trailed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, a comedian and public-access TV host from Chicago who had decided to document West’s attempts to become a successful musician.In “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” the three-part Netflix documentary that draws heavily on that footage, the camera serves two functions: It captures West at a vulnerable moment in his nascent career, when the future was anything but guaranteed. And it is also a kind of marker of success on its own. The camera’s presence forces the people West encounters to treat him just a tad more seriously, or at least to wonder if they should. In almost every encounter captured, there is a slight hiccup at the beginning, in which the other person wonders, what exactly are we doing here?West, one of the defining figures of the last 20 years, has been a consistent innovator in music and style. But he has also long had a preternatural grasp of the mechanisms of celebrity, how success is only truly impactful if it is imprinted onto others. West believed in himself, but wouldn’t stop until he’d convinced those around him, too.“Jeen-yuhs” is something like the demo tape of that phenomenon. It is both fascinating and obvious, eerie in the way that it foretells who West eventually would become by showing who he always has been.West, as we understand him now, is in early bloom during the first two of the docuseries’s three parts. Driving down lower Broadway in Manhattan, he tells a journalist sitting in the back seat how he feels when others tell him he’s thriving: “I might be living your American dream but I’m nowhere near where my dream is, dog. I got aspirations.” At one point, he says, “I’m trying to get to the point where I can drop the last name off my name.” (Indeed, he is now known solely as Ye.)Granting Simmons access was a combination of marketing savvy and also deep ego — “A little narcissistic or whatever,” West says. Nowadays, most pop superstars (and nowhere-near stars) are documented constantly for social media, but West understood the value of that labor early.The result is a prehistory of one of the most transfixing and agonizing celebrities of the 21st century. The footage could explain to aliens what creativity on Earth looks like. We see West recovering from his 2002 car crash, going through several dental procedures, and then getting back to work and emerging with “Through the Wire,” his debut single, which would finally catapult him toward the stratosphere. The camera captures a vivid, undimmable mind at constant, stubborn work.He asks to save the wires that held his jaw together, still bloody, for his mother, Donda. She appears throughout the film, often as a corrective force; even as West becomes more famous, he is never something other than his mother’s son. She doesn’t flinch from the lens, perhaps because the camera’s eye and that of a loving, knowing parent aren’t all that different.West also encourages the new people he meets to live out their relationship to him on camera. When he plays Pharrell Williams “Through the Wire,” Williams becomes a willing actor, walking out of the room and down the hall, overcome with thrill. After a recording session with Jay-Z in which West talks his way onto a song, Simmons prompts Jay-Z for a quote, asking him to literalize his co-sign of West for the camera.Not everyone plays along with West’s schemes. It’s odd to watch Scarface, one of rap music’s great philosophers, effectively pass on “Jesus Walks,” maybe the most meaningful and popular spiritual hip-hop song of all time. He also chides West for leaving his orthodontic retainers out on the countertop, a light spank from elder to child. (The retainers appear on several occasions, a symbolic embodiment of West’s still unformed persona.)There is, perhaps surprisingly, ample footage like this — this was an era in which West was almost always the less successful person in any interaction. Note the hangdog way in which he skulks out of the Roc-A-Fella Records office after going door to door and playing music for various executives, who seem to regard him as a lovable nuisance. Given how West moves through the world now, it’s disorienting to see him, time and again, as a supplicant.This is footage that most hagiographers would omit, but Simmons and his directing partner Chike Ozah — professionally, they’re known as Coodie & Chike — understand their subject differently. Simmons was inspired, he says in the film, by the Chicago basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams,” a film that cuts its melancholy with bolts of hope.And much about West in the early 2000s, before Roc-A-Fella Records relented and signed him as a recording artist (rather than just a producer), is lightly tragic. When West is at an industry event with far more famous people, in search of a little validation, Simmons films him from a distance, emphasizing his relative smallness. But even this footage doesn’t feel directed so much as captured, tiny moments that in the rear view appear huge.Cameras are not neutral — they change their subject. But while everyone lies for the camera, some people live in the camera. Throughout the film, West often appears most mindful of how history might regard him, driven by a sense that in a room full of people, the most important connection he could make was with Simmons’s lens. (See the scene in which he and Mos Def rap “Two Words,” and West appears to be staring through the camera’s aperture somewhere into the future.)Simmons offers largely space-filling voice-over throughout the film, not an unreliable narrator so much as an uncertain one. There is either far too much or not nearly enough of him, more likely the former: The segments where he links West’s story to his own feel particularly ill-placed, a distraction that doesn’t offer context on the main subject. And some narrative choices are contrived: Too much time is given over to West’s desire to be featured in an MTV News segment spotlighting new artists. (It so happens that MTV was where Simmons and Ozah met.)The success that Simmons had hoped to capture ended up being his termination notice — once West’s career was finally operating under its own steam, he left Simmons (and his footage) behind. That alone would have made for a compelling film. But the third segment, which is far more scattershot, consists largely of scraps that Simmons accrues over the next couple of decades, an era in which West becomes something unfamiliar to him: a world-building superstar.This episode is less narratively satisfying and coherent than the first two, but Simmons’s indiscriminate eye and his pre-existing comfort with West end up as assets. Where in the early 2000s, Simmons had an aspirant as his subject, now he has someone who exists between superhero and autocrat, a figure who isn’t performing simply for one camera but for a world of cameras and observers.There is a grim scene in which West is speaking with potential real estate partners, a gaggle of older white men, and tells them, “I took bipolar medication last night to have a normal conversation and turn alien to English.” He likens his treatment by the public to being drawn and quartered.Simmons lingers for a while — this is who his subject has become, and it is as important to see as any of the clips from when he was simply an up-and-comer. But real as it is, this isn’t the West that Simmons knows, or can stomach. There’s something itchy in the camerawork, and eventually Simmons does something that doesn’t seem to come naturally: He turns the camera off. More

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      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Champion of Indigenous Peoples, Dies at 85

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      As a teenager, she was the star of a film about an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family. As an adult, she fought discrimination in Australia against her people.Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who as a teenager was believed to be the first female Indigenous person to star in a feature film in Australia and later became an Aboriginal rights activist, died on Jan. 26 in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory. She was 85 and had been living in Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland.Her daughter, Ngarla Kunoth-Monks, said the cause was a stroke. Her family gave permission to use her name and image.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was cast in the title role of “Jedda,” a film directed by Charles Chauvel, which he wrote with his wife, Elsa. The story is about a teenager who is raised apart from her Aboriginal culture by a white woman after her mother dies in childbirth. Eventually, she is abducted by an Aboriginal man (played by Robert Tudawali).The Chauvels had come to her school in 1953, chosen her for the lead and taken her to locations around the Northern Territory and in Sydney. Away from her family and school, she recalled being lonely and scared. She said Mrs. Chauvel bullied her and, on several occasions, she tried to escape but did not succeed. She did not know how to be an actor, so she did as she was told, speaking the words she was fed.“I was in a state of confusion, a state of trauma,” Mrs. Kunoth-Monks said in an interview with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in 1995. “I really didn’t want to ask questions about what I was doing there, or what they were going to do with me. I was quite literally petrified that I wasn’t going to see my family, or my country, again.”She attended the premiere in the summer of 1955 at a segregated theater in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, but was allowed, she said, to sit in the whites-only section.In a review of “Jedda” in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, the critic Brian McArdle wrote that despite some rough edges to Mr. Chauvel’s direction, “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades.”Mrs. Kunoth-Monks recalled being horrified when she saw the sexual context of scenes with Mr. Tudawali in which he touched her. But looking back as an adult, she recognized in her character’s assimilation into her white foster mother’s world a subject that was not only true to life for people like her in Australia but one that would animate her future activism.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks in 1955, the year her movie, “Jedda,” was released. “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades,” one critic wrote at the time.History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock PhotoRosalie Lynette Kunoth was born on Jan, 4, 1937, in Utopia. Her father, Alan, sheared sheep. Her mother, Ruby Ngale, was a homemaker, and was an Aboriginal of the Anmatjere group. Her father’s parentage was mixed: his father was German and his mother was part-Aboriginal.Five years after the release of “Jedda” — the only movie she acted in — she joined an Anglican order in a suburb of Melbourne, where she took her final vows as a nun in 1964. But she recalled feeling sheltered from the travails of Aboriginal peoples, which she followed on television, and left the order in 1969. The next year, she married Bill Monks, whose sister had known Mrs. Kunoth-Monks while she was still a nun.She soon joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where she persuaded college students to help young Indigenous students with their school work, and set up what she said was the first group home for Aboriginal families in Victoria whose goal was to keep children from being separated from their parents.She left in 1977 to run a hostel in Alice Springs; started the social work section at a hospital there; was the chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service; a commissioner of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an adviser on Indigenous affairs to the chief minister of the Northern Territory and chairman of Batchelor Institute, a school for Aboriginal students, also in the Northern Territory.Malarndirri McCarthy, a senator in the Australian parliament from the Northern Territory, in a statement after Mrs. Kunoth-Monks’s death, praised her “quietly spoken yet determined focus on challenging institutional racism.”In 2008, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was elected to a four-year term as president of the Barkly Shire, a local governmental entity in the Northern Territory. It was a year after the Australian government’s imposition of a series of laws on the Northern Territory that were, in part, designed to crack down on child sexual abuse and alcoholism in Indigenous communities.The government’s raft of measures — referred to as the Intervention — included the compulsory acquisition of dozens of Aboriginal communities under five-year federal leases; restricting the sale, consumption and purchase of alcohol in certain areas, and linking income support payments to school attendance for people on Aboriginal land.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks opposed the Intervention as discriminatory because it so clearly targeted Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. As part of her protest, she and the Rev. Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra, a clan leader and ceremonial lawman in the Northern Territory, met in 2010 in Geneva with the United Nations’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.The two later issued a report which said: “Ordinary Australians can see this injustice in a democratic country and know that it shouldn’t be happening. When you share with a body such as the U.N.,” they wrote, “straight away they see that Australia is racist and that the Government does not govern with the spirit of peace and order.”In addition to her daughter, she is survived by many grandchildren; her sisters Teresa Tilmouth and Irene Kunoth; her brothers, Don Kunoth and Colin Kunoth; her foster daughters, Elaine Power, Natasha Adams and Patrice Power, and her foster son, Mathew Adams. Her husband died in 2011.In 2014, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was a featured voice in “Utopia,” a documentary by John Pilger about the mistreatment of First Nations peoples, as Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are called.In a panel discussion on Australian television after the film’s release, she articulated her opposition to the federal government’s policies toward her people and any attempt to forcibly assimilate them.“This is the country I came out from,” she said. “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here. My language, in spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists — I am alive, I am here and now — and I speak my language.”She added, “I practice my cultural essence of me.” More

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      ‘Top of the Heap’: Is It Blaxploitation? Avant-Garde? Afrofuturism? All Three.

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      Released in 1972 and now rediscovered, the movie is as ambitious as “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and even weirder.The tale of a tightly wound Black police officer whose identity crisis leads to an action-packed nervous breakdown, “Top of the Heap” makes a statement — not least in that its writer-director, Christopher St. John, is also the star.Hardly seen since its initial 1972 release, “Top of the Heap” was rediscovered about a decade ago by the determined programmer of Chicago’s Black Cinema House. Now restored, it’s getting a theatrical run at BAM in Brooklyn.The movie, which appeared a year after Melvin Van Peebles’s one-man show “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” rocked the world, is nearly as confrontational and no less ambitious. Uptight and disagreeable, St. John’s George Lattimer isn’t a conventional hero; nor, as The Amsterdam News dryly noted in a generally favorable review, “the stuff of which positive images are made.”George has every problem a white cop would have and many more. Universally suspicious, he is subject to racial epithets by Black drug dealers and roughed up by a white cop only too eager to mistake him for a criminal. His crisis begins when he learns that, after 12 years on the Washington, D.C., police force, he has been passed over for sergeant and his mother in Alabama has died.“Top of the Heap” devotes considerable time to George’s compensatory fantasies, mainly daydreams of being the first Black astronaut. The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun, who found the movie uneven, wrote that these excesses allowed it to “develop a measure of genuine interest.” If it were an avant-garde film, “Top of the Heap” would be considered a psychodrama, with the artist turning the camera on himself.As replete with zappy flashbacks as an Alain Resnais production, “Top of the Heap” is stabilized by its fiercely alienated central performance. St. John, an Actors Studio member who had recently played a Black militant onscreen (“Shaft”) and onstage (“No Place to Be Somebody”), intentionally makes no effort to woo the spectator. Consequently the film is stolen by the singer-dancer Paula Kelly.Identified in the credits as only the Black Chick, Kelly has a comic scene in which she confounds George by setting his complaints to music, and another in which, sheathed in gold lamé, she parodies Tina Turner with the cyclonic spin she puts on the plodding country-western gospel song “Put Your Hand in the Hand.”Very much of its moment, “Top of the Heap” begins with a hippie-hardhat mud-wrestling riot and ends with a sniper assassination; it was topical enough to snag J.J. Johnson’s first score after “Shaft” and provide a popular Nixon impersonator his movie debut. At one point, George and his nerdy white partner (Leonard Kuras) discuss the possibility of U.F.O.s. George says he would caution the aliens to stay away: “We got Richard Nixon here.”George’s dreams of escaping Earth are almost a metaphor for the movie — the only commercial feature that St. John would ever make. If this intimation of Afrofuturism suggests that the “Top of the Heap” was a bit ahead of its time, so, too, was its critique of blaxploitation, delivered even before the clichés had hardened.Top of the HeapFeb. 18-24 at BAM in Brooklyn; bam.org. More

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      ‘Uncharted’ Review: Steal, Fight, Repeat

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      This inaptly titled treasure-hunt adventure recycles all the familiar clichés while giving Tom Holland a strenuous physical workout.At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie “Uncharted,” an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series. Now, it is Tom Holland’s turn to cash in with a musty story about ancient loot, old maps, lost ships, invisible ink and a wealthy scoundrel with disposable minions. But while he’s following in Cage’s inimitable footsteps, Holland also seems in training to become Tom Cruise 2.0.The similarities between “Uncharted” and the first “National Treasure” are notable, with both movies adhering to the same booty-questing template. Each opens with a flashback of the protagonist as a wee lad eagerly being primed for adventure by an older male relative, a misty rite of passage that seems calculated to put a family-friendly stamp on an otherwise greed-driven setup. In “National Treasure,” the kid soon becomes a character played by Cage, whose singular, offbeat performance style can elevate and disrupt crummy material.In “Uncharted,” the boy grows up to become a neo-buccaneer played by the boyish Holland, a likable, exuberantly physical performer who has traded his Spider-Man responsibilities for more old-school heroic duty. The Hollywood action movie seems an open field right now partly because most of the male stars who headline non-comic-book blockbusters are middle-aged or older. Holland is 25. He’s cute without being threatening or distractingly, Chalamet-esquely beautiful, and has enough presence and training (dance, gymnastics, parkour) that he can bluff and breeze past clichés while gracefully bouncing through fights and obstacles.Cruise will be 61 when the next “Mission: Impossible” finally (maybe) opens in July 2023. He’s likely to keep going Energizer Bunny-style for years to come. Still, the paucity of young male actors who have the profile, credits and skill set to sell studio goods like “Uncharted” may prove a lucrative opportunity for Holland and his treasure-seeking handlers. At any rate that may explain the images of his character, Nate Drake, a thief who moonlights as a bartender (or vice versa), pulling some smooth moves on the job, a bit of juggling tomfoolery that instantly triggers images of Cruise in “Cocktail.”Soon enough, though, Nate leaves behind his gig and his New York pad for an international escapade that he embarks on in tandem with Mark Wahlberg’s Sully, a more experienced, openly untrustworthy thief. A veteran of workaday blockbusters, Wahlberg serves twinned functions here as a presold pop-culture brand and an archetypal mentor for Nate. Sully can sprint, fight and trade unfunny quips without breaking a sweat, and Wahlberg is just fine delivering the same gruff, regular-guy performance that he always does. He shares top billing with Holland, but Wahlberg is largely onboard as training wheels for the younger actor.“Uncharted” is based on a PlayStation game of the same name that first hit in 2007 and that tracks the globe-trotting doings of its Everyman hero, said to be descended from the British privateer Sir Francis Drake. The movie, directed by Ruben Fleischer, nods to the game and Sir Francis, who circumnavigated the globe in the 16th century and was instrumental in England’s challenge to Spain. Given the current climate, though, it’s a surprise that the movie didn’t quietly ignore Sir Francis, who participated in establishing the slave trade. In 2020, a statue of Sir Francis in Britain was draped in chains with a sign reading “decolonize history.”Hollywood’s penchant for ignoring inconvenient historical truths means that the movie leans into Sir Francis’s globe-trotting and plundering as well as his fight against the Spanish, in this case through the proxy figure of Santiago Moncada (Antonio Banderas). A Barcelona moneybags, Santiago is out to enhance his fortune with the same treasure that Nate and Sully are chasing. It’s a bit of a bummer to see Banderas back in this type of throwaway role, though presumably stars can’t live on Pedro Almodóvar movies alone. Mostly, Banderas handsomely scowls, barks orders and helps keep the machinery chugging.For his part, Nate grins and grimaces, runs and leaps, nimbly going through many of the same action-movie paces that heroic avatars have long gone through. He also types on a computer keyboard, wears a tux at a fancy party à la James Bond and flirts with a romantic foil, Chloe (Sophia Ali). Like the movie’s scariest baddie, Braddock (Tati Gabrielle), Chloe is one of those tough — but sexy! — female characters who’s more physically in the mix than she would have been in the past, back when the love interest was played by the blonde du jour. But while Chloe and Braddock are clearly adding something new to the same old story, they’re still performing the same old roles for yet another Hollywood male contender.UnchartedRated PG-13 for relatively bloodless death and violence. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’ Review: Behind Two Fatal Crashes

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      This documentary on Netflix leaves the impression that the 737 Max’s entire existence is rotten.Regardless of any changes that Boeing made to the 737 Max, regardless of the clearance the revised plane received from the Federal Aviation Administration in late 2020, “Downfall: The Case Against Boeing” leaves the impression that its entire existence is a mistake: that it was cobbled together for the wrong reasons, to boost short-term stock gains and to avoid the time and costs of engineering a new, non-737 plane.The problems of the Max, and how its flawed design was implicated in the crashes of flights on Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines, killing hundreds, have been well-aired, and this documentary, directed by Rory Kennedy (“Last Days in Vietnam”), does not break news or break ground cinematically. (We don’t need to see filler footage of a reporter making calls.) But it is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit. As the movie explains, in the first crash they were put in the position of having seconds to beat back a system that Boeing had never told pilots was on the aircraft.“Downfall” features interviewees who have gotten lost or abstracted in all the coverage, including the wife of the Lion Air captain, family members of the passenger victims and former Boeing employees. “How many times have you heard companies say, ‘We’re committed to excellence, we’re committed to safety, we’re committed to our customers’?” asks Andy Pasztor, who reported on the story for The Wall Street Journal, in summation. His verdict: “We should be skeptical.”Downfall: The Case Against BoeingRated PG-13. Upsetting material involving the crashes. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Dog’ Review: Man and Beast Hit the Road

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      In his directing debut, Channing Tatum plays an Army Ranger on a healing journey with a canine comrade.Road comedies that pair an animal and a movie star are a minor genre unto themselves. The best examples, in my opinion, involve Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde, though the recent one with Eastwood and a rooster wasn’t bad. Channing Tatum is a different kind of screen presence — sweeter, chattier, bulkier — and in “Dog,” which he directed with Reid Carolin, he amiably shares the screen with (spoiler alert!) a dog.She is a Belgian Malinois named Lulu (played by three talented canines), and she has served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. So has Tatum’s character, Jackson Briggs, a former Army Ranger living in a cabin in the Northwest. A history of brain injuries has kept him out of action, but he hopes that a good word from his commanding officer will give him a chance to go back overseas.To make that happen, Jackson agrees to accompany Lulu from Fort Lewis, Ore., to Nogales, Ariz. The reason for the road trip is the funeral of her handler, a Ranger whose death in a car crash haunts Jackson and the film. While “Dog” is a man-beast buddy movie, it’s also preoccupied with grief, trauma and the challenges of post-combat life. Lulu and Jackson are both wounded warriors who must learn to trust each other and help each other heal.Though much is made of Lulu’s ferociousness, the film’s humor is gentle and mostly unthreatening. She chews up the seats in Jackson’s already battered Ford Bronco, disrupts his potential threesome with a pair of Tantra practitioners in Portland and causes an unfortunate ruckus in a San Francisco hotel. Jackson has variously awkward, hostile and touching human encounters, notably with New Age cannabis growers and a resentful, racist police officer.“Dog” is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin. It’s also circumspect about Lulu and Jackson’s experiences of war, which is vaguely understood as something horrible but also glorious. Neither one is as complex as a real dog or a real man would be, which makes the movie an easy watch, but at the cost of some credibility. It’s friendly and eager to please, but it won’t quite hunt.DogRated PG-13. More barking than biting. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More